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I agree with your statements.

Every Billionaire who recently acquired a large media house[1] mentioned in the interviews as doing it for 'Upholding Journalism' or something of those lines which also implicitly meant 'Supporting right to free speech'.

But I'm bewildered about how this particular acquisition is only about 'Right to Free speech' vs 'No Right to Free Speech' and not really about hostile takeover of a business by a Ultra-Billionaire with impunity?

I guess that has something to do with how good Elon is at controlling the narrative, Even reputable news agencies start with 'Elon who claims himself as a free speech absolutist...'. And that was before he controlled Twitter.

Anyways, Two major social media firms seems to have consolidated with individuals who are supposed to run a social media firm.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45550747

I think he's dumb wasting so much money on this, but why on earth wouldn't shareholders want to sell out to him? If I held Twitter shares I'd be quite keen to get rid of them.

"The billionaire businessman who led the resurrection of the electric vehicle industry and the birth of the private spaceflight industry is an idiot." - internet commenter.

Musk has proven himself to be a very savvy investor. And his operational track record is nearly unmatched. Particularly because it straddles so many different industries: internet 1.0 (Zip2), banking and payments (PayPal), manufacturing and transportation (Tesla), aerospace engineering and spaceflight (SpaceX). If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him.

At some point I stopped investing in companies and started investing in people. There's a small group of businessmen out there that have the Midas touch.

Would you care to share some of your other people you invest in? It seems like a good strategy in this day and age.

SolarCity was such a bad investment he had to hide the financials by stuffing it inside of Tesla

It's very hard for my explain, within my company, that "failure" isn't the opposite if "success."

... if you're not failing some of the time, you're not trying things ambitious enough ...

Proven ability to mitigate failures.

SolarCity was a worthwhile cause at least. He often says that money isn't his motivator and I believe him about that. And something may yet come of it.

Not selling the stock of his own companies makes him "a very savy investor"?

How did he "get" the stock of his own companies? Who allocated the capital within those companies? Is not Musk's time a considerably valuable investment unto itself?

Also, reminder, he didn't found Tesla. He was one of its initial investors.

We can split hairs and refine definitions until we exclude him from the category of successful investors, but, at a certain point, it's a little hard to believe.

In any event, it is quite clear that Musk has no intention of being a silent investor. Rather, he's going to be an operator. And in that regard, he is nearly unparalleled.

> If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him.

And since he's got so many projects on-going, you think he has all of the time in the world to pull this one off? Explain that ONE to me?

He had that whole fake solar shingle scam presentation thing to bail out his own cousins and self.

I know you're being snarky, but success as a hyper-capitalist is less and less a good thing to many people, and not really a sign of great intelligence (more psychopathy, if anything). His behavior is very often so incredibly childlike that it's hard to excuse on his business success. Even this! A share price based on $4.20; Really?! Again with that? He is clearly trolling and it's working because here everyone is talking about it.

I don't agree with your claims, but they are beside the point.

His track record speaks for itself. I would certainly have far more confidence in Musk than the current leadership team.

Musk is at least competent in software engineering, aerospace engineering, and finance. It is hard not to see that as a strong indicator of an intelligence well above average. People bend over backwards to look past the glaring facts about Musk that contradict their biases.

Musk is hyper intelligent. Musk is one the most successful business people of all time.

Why are you deifying him? He's not anymore special than the rest of us, he just has a lot of money.

It’s not a deification to recognize that the total upheaval and reinvention of three industries - automobiles and aerospace and finance - is something that very, very few people could do, even if they had luck and fortune going into it.

Aerospace sure, but automobiles and finance? Musk just bought Tesla, and he was fired from PayPal because he wanted to replace all of their Unix infrastructure with Windows.

I’m not saying he’s dumb, he’s clearly a smart guy, but I don’t think he’s anything special

I don’t know much beyond the surface w.r.t. PayPal, but it’s quite a distortion of history to claim that all Musk did was ‘just buy Tesla’.

Why I think he upended the auto industry:

- He bought Tesla within the first two years (IIRC) of it being founded; before there was even a working prototype

- He laid out the groundwork for the three-stage plan, and followed through

  - Stage 1: Prototype -> Roadster
  - Stage 2: Model S/X
  - Stage 3: Model 3/Y

- He adopted high-tech in Teslas which make them compelling and ‘cool’ (for the general public), through Autopilot, games (Cuphead, Asteroids, etc), video (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc), OTA software updates, and more

And, the most important piece:

- He led and developed the Supercharger network initiative, partially solving the problem of EVs as true ICE replacements

Each of those decisions could have, and likely would have, been handled differently by Random CEO. It was only through each of those decisions, and a lot of luck, that Tesla is a viable car company today.

I’m quick to criticize Musk, but what he did with Tesla is truly incredible and deserving of praise.

"Musk just bought Tesla"

That just is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. When Musk took over Tesla, it was a very small startup with 6 employees or so. All the subsequent growth into the behemoth that it is today has happened under his management.

If someone adopted a newborn and raised him to adulthood, would you dismiss them as not-a-real-parent of that kid?

Musk's role in Tesla is similar to Ray Kroc's in McDonald's. Not a founder either, but the person that took over a totally irrelevant small business and developed it into a world class superpower in its field.

To be dismissive of such an accomplishment is unwise at best.

Zip2: Musk wrote the software for drawing vector maps & calculating point to point directions anywhere in US. Sold it for $300M.

PayPal: Musk founded X.com. X merged with PayPal. Through that merger, Musk became PayPal's largest shareholder. He was ousted as the company's CEO. He did attempt to move the company's tech onto Windows. None of this invalidates his accomplishment's at PayPal. To wit, he walked away with $100M.

Tesla: Musk did not buy Tesla. 8 months after Tesla was founded, he funded the majority of Tesla's series A at which time he became the chairman of its board. He then stepped into the CEO role and has maintained that role ever since.

SpaceX: Musk trained himself in rocket engineering and pioneered private spaceflight while pushing rocket tech far into the future. Self landing rockets. <- I don't even need a full sentence. Self. Landing. ROCKETS!!!!

Its very important to get the facts right before moving on to interpretation.

Of course, Musk didn't do all of this himself. He has again and again hired top notch engineers and scientists. But even in the most biased publications, his critics begrudgingly acknowledge his technical prowess and commercial acumen.

Again, just look at the list of accomplishments. He is a man, not a god. But in these domains, he is absolutely something special. Many sigma special.

“What the hell have y’all done, to even have an opinion on what I’ve been doing?”

Jay Z

He's an asshole but an effective one. I didn't take a job with him because I didn't like him, but I also don't think I would have made the same choice at a different phase of my life.

"Billionaires shouldn't be criticized unless you also happen to be a billionaire." -next_xibalba

This is just opinion-me, but I think he might be undervaluing the shares in the long-term. It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.

I guess for cashing out though it doesn't matter, since the shareholders won't need to care about what Twitter's stock does in the future. So, maybe you're right.

Easy to verify, we'll just have to wait and see if he succeeds.

The market disagrees with you.

The market is an unreliable narrator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

> It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.

Those promises are predicated on him owning it though.

I'm doubtful of Twitter's LTV whether he owns it or not, but then again I've never had an account and now that you pretty much can't read it without one, I basically don't use it at all. So I may not be a qualified observer, but to me Twitter seems to only get worse for years now.

If that price isn't reasonable for Twitter long-term then you must have someone other than the current management in mind to realise that value...

I do think that Twitter's been getting steadily worse, but I'm not convinced that means they'll be less valuable in the future.

I think if I were an investor, my thought might be that Musk might not be necessary to realize that growth (again, speaking in the long term, not that the current price is wrong). But I'm not an investor, I don't really know Twitter's numbers.

I guess the caveat I should give is that if I were an investor and I thought Twitter was falling and that Musk couldn't save it, this would be a particularly good opportunity to jump ship. So that could also be an angle I'm not thinking of.

> we'll just have to wait and see if he succeeds.

He or anyone else

Twitter is a natural monopoly - evidenced by it's not having any real competition. Will it be a regulated monopoly? In that case, it should be valued like a water company. Is it an unregulated monopoly? In that case the market will decide if it can turn that monopoly into profits. There are a lot of commercial Twitter users. Charge them all ten cents a tweet. That adds up to about $10m per day.

You’re kidding. It’s a monopoly if you define the market as “Twitter”. There is no shortage of social networks.

You’re kidding. It’s a monopoly if you define the market as “Twitter”. There is no shortage of social networks. Certainly nothing about Twitter is a natural monopoly. Nothing prevents starting up a competitor or even a clone. The issue of locked in networks can be solved with regulation to open the data. It isn’t required that a single company own microblogging.

I feel the stock of Twitter could easy go above 54$ in less than 2 or 3 years no?

I guess it depends on that, do you think Twitter stock will just keep going down, or could it relatively quickly outperform that offer?

Agree with everything you wrote except "maybe more people will start using Mastodon".

I didn't even know this existed until you said it, which doesn't bode well for mass adoption given that I'm someone who's on the internet daily.

Moreover, Mastodon.com is owned by a forestry machine business, and googling Mastodon gives a first result for a rock/metal band. I think "Mastodon.social" might be about as bad as a web address can get for mass appeal / catchiness.

> mass adoption

is absolutely not a priority for the Mastodon software project.

Try looking on Github:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

> I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech.

The only people with coherent philosophies of free speech are for absolute freedom of speech or absolutely no freedom of speech.

It's by pusuring incoherence, by threading the needle between those extremes that we create an open, free speech culture where freedom is the norm and censorship occurs only in extreme situations.

I generally agree with the rest of your post ("who cares?"). I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.

> I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.

This is completely off topic and not at all your fault, but even though we are actively talking about Elon Musk and he should have been the primary person in my head, and even though the spelling is different -- for some reason my brain still interpreted "Elon" in the above sentence as Ellen DeGeneres, and I got really confused for about 10 seconds about why you felt the need to add that you would also be OK with her specifically buying Twitter.

maybe more people will start using Mastodon

For sure. Dozens of users will migrate to Mastodon.

Yup.

Anything pushed to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite. Since society can't or won't reign in either corporate or social media, perhaps we should remove all restraints and let then destroy themselves, and hopefully each other.

Further, how could Musk possibly be any worse than @jack, Zuck & Sandberg, Murdochs, Theil, etc, etc.

Pox on all their houses.

He arguably didn't know what he was doing with Tesla or SpaceX, nor The Boring Company et al, though he seems quite good at solving for problems he deems worthy enough of his attention - or that draw his attention strongly enough.

Elon also doesn't need to innovate himself, he simply needs to be a signal, a beacon or lighthouse to others who know they are capable of innovating - and where they may now actually attempt to work for/at Twitter/with Elon because they may now believe they have a chance of implementing systems as they may believe Elon will be able to understand their design - and therefore getting approval.

The obvious question is, “What problem is he seeking to solve?”

SpaceX seems like a success. Starlink probably will be, too.

Tesla survived because of government subsidies and a neverending deluge of hype from Musk. Boring Company is utter nonsense and a huge failure.

That track record seems... pretty random. Maybe Musk was an important factor, maybe his engineering and marketing teams were, maybe luck was the most important thing.

Regarding tesla, lots of companies survive entirely because of Government Subsidies. Resource extraction from public lands, no bid cost + contracts for defense department projects, last mile monopolies for cable companies.

You going to then argue "but we'd have it all better if there were no meddling government!" ? There are plenty of places that have no government and they seem pretty miserable.

People (ideally) select other people every interval of time to make important decisions (aka "government"); sometimes those decisions adversely affect some people and help others disproportionately (your job is cutting down trees and 99% of the trees are gone? Well, you may lose your job before cutting down that last 1% because the trees have value as trees instead of lumber; sorry them's the breaks).

Life is hard and full of difficult choices. There are winners and losers. It's better for everyone to make decisions by discussion and consensus rather than violence.

But free speech is "will the government arrest/fine/murder you for what you say (or don't say)" not "do I have to listen to you blather on when I'd rather not".

There's tremendous nuance to "free speech". If I'm a cake maker and you ask me to make a cake saying "Fuck Jewish Space Lasers!" can I say no I'd rather not? I'm not sure. Maybe I've got terms of service already, maybe I'm just a harried cake maker trying to be civil and a good person and I'd rather not be an asshole even by proxy. You could probably switch the message to "Happy anniversary Steve and Paul!" and offend some other set of people.

We seem to live in a society where some set of people just want to be rude and uncivil and force us all to watch like we're in a clockwork orange needing programming. Please no, and while you're at it I'd rather you stop pouring garbage into my father in law.

I don't know where all of that came from. My point is just that there's no proof Musk is a better CEO/visionary than thousands of other business leaders. You seem to have constructed a lot of other points that I was not commenting on at all.

I agree that many of businesses survive only because of subsidies and that "free speech" does not mean that private entities cannot censor themselves.

Yes... sorry to imply any particular viewpoint on your part.

Musk's particular talent, in my view, is his ability to manage exponential growth where there's an extremely narrow set of possibly successful outcomes given a set of constraints.

Maybe he sees a way to get twitter back to exponential growth? I don't.

I appreciate your nuance, patience, and civility.

> My point is just that there's no proof Musk is a better CEO/visionary than thousands of other business leaders.

The objective measure of a business leader's success seems pretty obviously the value of their businesses, is it not?

No. Leaders are a small factor in the success of a business. Other, bigger factors usually include:

- luck/timing

- investor enthusiasm (longer runway)

- regulatory environment

- early hires

- later hires

etc.

Ok. Do we just dismiss all business success then? Is there no way to understand the effectiveness of business men?

Like I said, the objective of business is to make money. One guy made more money than anyone else.

There's also a lot of luck in sports but the team with the most wins at the end of the season is the best team in the regular season.

> Do we just dismiss all business success then?

No, we just don't attribute it to a single man with an incredibly inconsistent track record.

> Like I said, the objective of business is to make money. One guy made more money than anyone else.

Tesla is an unusually unsuccessful company when compared to other public companies that have existed for the same amount of time.

Musk is wealthy because of his incessant promises/lies about Tesla, not because the business is making so much money.

Arguably, his stubbornness against learning the lessons of 100 years of vehicle manufacturing is holding Tesla back.

> There's also a lot of luck in sports but the team with the most wins at the end of the season is the best team in the regular season.

This analogy is ridiculous. Sports teams compete in tightly-controlled environments. Even then, we attribute some success to coaching, ownership, luck of the schedule, etc.

But even if we accept the analogy, Musk's "team" has not scored the most points.

> Tesla is an unusually unsuccessful company when compared to other public companies that have existed for the same amount of time.

I think you're packing a lot into the definition of successful there. Tesla has been an excellent investment. The value of the company as determined by the market is high. Your definition of "success" is not dissuading investors. Investors believe in the future of Tesla.

> Musk is wealthy because of his incessant promises/lies about Tesla, not because the business is making so much money.

Lots of things that people consider unethical still make you money. That doesn't change the objective fact that he's made a ton of money through business ventures.

> But even if we accept the analogy, Musk's "team" has not scored the most points.

But Musk has.

You can attribute all you want to luck if you'd like but I think that makes you look like a fool when you consider that he didn't just do it once, he did it twice and changed both markets he entered drastically.

His businesses are worth a ton of money.

He is personally worth a ton of money.

Your earlier comment

> That track record seems... pretty random.

is absurd. Most people can't start one successful business. You think he got lucky twice? Three times if you count Starlink which likely gets spun out into it's own business eventually.

And those business aren't just successful in that they aren't out of business, they're massive successes and have made him the richest person in the world (minus some saudi's who probably hold more non-public wealth).

> he simply needs to be a signal, a beacon or lighthouse to others who know they are capable of innovating

There's nothing wrong with that. It's immensely valuable to society to be able to inspire, attract, and organize talent.

Maybe we'll see less links to unreadable twitter threads posted here. One can only hope!

Nothing makes me roll my eyes than seeing a tweet have 1/24. Pigeonholing stuff onto platforms where it doesn't fit.

Reddit is turning into a Tiktok aggregator as well, overbearing music, aggressive edits, and juvenile takes. At least those are short though.

Twitter only needs one change, and is as simple as this: make users confident that they will never be censored for saying something that goes against management's politics. Twitter has seriously violated this trust. That's why current management cannot save Twitter. Even if they say they will accept all speech from now on, nobody will believe them.

I think Musk believes that Twitter is the primary meeting place and seemingly unified-ish mouthpiece of anti-capitalists in the west and he's seeing that they are making dangerous progress. He's someone who is a capitalist and feels that $50B is a worthy investment to disrupt anti-capitalist momentum.

I think that is a very narrow view on events.

First, I really do not think twitter is a anticapitalist forum and second, controlling twitter communication yields quite some power.

Single tweets made furor on the stock market.

It is probably way more about money, than anti activism, or pro free speech activism. (plus the personal vendetta of the twitter bot, who published Elons flights).

> they are making dangerous progress

lol

Twitter has 400 million users GLOBALLY. How many are bots? How many are active? How many are "anti-capitalists"?

Twitter is not representative of anything except twitter.

You say that, but the memes and quotes generated from twitter posts and threads spread far and wide. You'll see people who don't even use Twitter quoting things almost verbatim 3 months after it blew up. Same with 4chan and the fringe right sadly. The memes, like "OK Groomer" start out in some weird radical place but then catch elsewhere if they are viral enough.

I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did.

Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.

You're not necessarily wrong, but Twitter's moderation policy is already basically terrible and I have very little confidence that they'll be able to improve it significantly in the future with or without Musk. Most of the moderation policies that they are proposing are regularly co-opted to target oppressed or minority groups. They don't seem to be particularly consistent or great about catching abuse in the first place. The site's structure itself seems to encourage bad actors.

It's certainly the case that Musk could potentially make that worse, but I guess I have so little confidence in Twitter's ability to get better on that front that I'm not sure it matters all that much in the long run.

Better moderation on these platforms requires a large re-think in how we approach moderation in the first place, and it requires a more socially responsible perspective about the platform's purpose. I don't think that Musk being in charge or not will make that happen, and if he does turn Twitter into even more of a cesspool, then maybe that'll encourage alternatives.

I'm not an accelerationist when it comes to social media, but I think that Musk/Twitter's attitudes towards free speech online are often both naive and incompetent and the site continuing to worsen might be the only way to get people off of it; and I'm not sure what blocking Musk actually preserves about the site (other than possibly that Musk might push for more aggressive monetization). There are people right now who rely on it that would need to find other hosting, and that does genuinely stink. But... I mean, it's gonna get worse for them regardless.

> Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms

I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't really feel like social media companies have learned how to handle speech or that they've become competent about doing moderation at scale. I don't think there ever was a point where they figured it out. If we've learned anything it's that moderation at a global scale is kind of unworkable, and that's why having smaller communities that pay more attention to the content they host is so important. I'm particularly pessimistic about the possibility of AI/algorithmic moderation (which many of these companies are leaning into more and more), mostly because I don't see a ton of evidence that it's good enough at scale to replace human moderation.

So I'm not worried about Musk bringing back systematic misinformation or troll farms or accidentally enabling genocide because as far as I can tell Twitter already has that problem; I don't think Musk can bring it back because I don't think it ever went away.

Musk does not hold any position in the government. My understanding is that the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals. The first amendment of the US already protects people from that. Any private platform can do whatever they want though.

What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech? Remember when all these corporations banned Trump at the same time? Imagine not being able to buy from Amazon when there is no retailer left. Imagine not being able to listen to music or watch movies when all of it is only available through streaming. What about having all your email deleted because a Google bot flagged your account. Or being shadow banned in social media, having no impact on any discussion.

> What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech?

Government, no question about it. Twitter doesn't throw you in jail.

As somebody who is banned on Twitter for unclear reasons, I can unequivocally say that this is preferable to being thrown in jail or fined by the government

but there isn't one retailer or one social media service so why should I imagine fictional scenarios when considering your question?

There's the ideal and ethic of free speech which isn't "provided" by the government. It's ok to be annoyed or disagree with private censorship.

Good or bad Musk wants to open the platform up. Whether that will just change the speech to what he likes or actually broaden it we'll see.

While freedom from goverent censorship of speech is one battle that has been (mostly) won in the USA, some want to take the concept of free speech even further. Some want to see corporations choose to uphold the value of "free speech". This is seperate from any goveremt regulation of speech.

You’re half correct.

A culture of free speech is just as important as a law prohibiting Congress from abridging it. It is true that private companies have their own free speech and private property interests they should safeguard, but that does not mean they cannot do more to raise a culture of free speech on their platforms, and they should!

One could argue that Twitter is a de-facto public place. The Supreme Court opined:

“the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501, 506 (1946)

They have since narrowed their interpretation somewhat, but some states (including California) have ruled that de-facto public gathering places such as shopping malls are areas where free speech is protected, even though they are privately owned.

So generally, yes a private platform can do what they want, but if their primary focus is to be open to the public, they may be more bound to providing first amendment protections.

AFAIK no court has specifically ruled on whether online public spaces should be treated the same as physical public spaces.

It doesn't really matter though, because in California, the state constitution explicitly states that privately owned spaces open to the public (so twitter) must guarantee freedom of expression. The case law is pretty absolute and settled in this regard. Most famously... shopping malls in California have to allow union protests within the malls (with only mild regulation, mainly around safety / opening hours). Thus, by the Supreme Law of the state of California, as a private company, Twitter is legally obligated to -- at least for California residents -- not restrict their legally protected speech. Twitter frequently does this to california residents, thus violating California law. If the law was applied equally, they would be fined and censured as the malls were who tried to union bust.

> the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals

It is not. The first amendment of the constitution of the United States is, but freedom of speech is just freedom of speech.